One thing I think this article does a good job of doing is providing the context for understanding the AI takeover of government. Rather than a sudden jolt of revolution, this is just the next step in a long process. It's half a century of movement conservatism fully automated.
But the biggest issue with using AI is twofold: the routine wild inaccuracy of AI tools, as well as the particularly haphazard manner in which DOGE wants to use it. The Biden administration had been slowly integrating AI into government tasks, but it was pretty clear about guarding against potential risks: errors in coding, for example, or added security vulnerabilities. The Musk team is not going to care about that at all. If a one-line code error flags billions of dollars in “wasteful” spending improperly, that’s probably seen as a feature, not a bug. If the AI goes haywire and starts making things up, or the code breaks systems that need to be redundant and reliant, oh well, government isn’t supposed to work well anyway. And if back doors are opened up to allow hackers or adversaries to poke through, maybe they’ll develop a patch later.
That’s the Silicon Valley mindset: move fast and break things, like Social Security. And it has merged with the MAGA mindset. Without transparency in what AI is supposed to look for, you can bet it will be reverse-engineered to spit out a desired result, whether about climate change or DEI or whatever.
So on one level, you can expect the inexperienced coders trying to find trillions in cuts by lazily feeding government data through AI tools to make mistakes, trigger cybersecurity breaches, and neglect AI hallucinations. On another level, you can expect government data to be highly politicized. The White House plans to make chief information officers at the agencies political appointees, who would have loyalty to the president and a willingness to manipulate data for ideological purposes. We’ve already seen this with the installation of Musk ally Tom Krause overseeing the Treasury payment system.
For more background, here is a recent interview with the historian Quinn Slobodian. The main insight here has to do with ways in which the techno-feudal impulse unfolding under Trump II is in line with the natural course of the neoliberal order and not a radical departure from it.
Finally, one more point about this Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" ethic. There is an accelerationist argument from the left that supposes this all works out for the best in the end. But this is a gross fantasy. Here is a recent Adam Johnson column pointing out that Elon is never going to "break" the things we might actually like to see broken.
It’s worth noting that not all of Musk’s attacks on the administrative and liberal state are equally pernicious. There are real issues with USAID and its role as a soft power arm of meddling US imperial bureaucrats, as well as a political shield for U.S. atrocities, from Yemen to Gaza, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere. But USAID also does objectively useful work because many countries grow dependent on them, and it’s very clear that, based on recent statements made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, what is most likely going to happen is the sinister activity USAID does will simply be folded back into the State Department directly or the CIA (as it used to be) while the Incidentally Good Stuff USAID does will be be eliminated. Despite his faux libertarian posturing, Musk, of course, doesn’t care about the anti-imperialist argument. He hates USAID because he thinks it helps keep black and brown people alive, which—by virtue of the US being a largely unipolar empire—it very much does, regardless of motives.